Cards Come to Town

For the first time this year, the St. Louis Cardinals make an appearance in Cincinnati. The Reds will be looking for a bit of revenge as the first two meetings between these rivals have gone the Cardinals’ way, leaving the Reds 2-4 against their arch rivals.

The big story with the Cardinals right now is that they have no fewer than four starting pitchers one the disabled list. Chris Carpenter hasn’t played a game for them this year, of course, but Jaime Garcia and Jake Westbrook have both gone down with injuries since the Reds last saw them. And then there’s John Gast, who was called up to replace Westbrook and promptly injured himself in his third start. The only one of these pitchers close to returning is Jake Westbrook, but he won’t make it back in time for this series.

So, the pitching matchups for the upcoming series should go like this:

Now, with all due respect to the Cardinals’ seemingly magical ability to produce Cy Young clones, I only really believe in Adam Wainwright’s numbers. Lyons has only 20 major league innings and there is nothing in his minor league track record to indicate this kind of ability while Lynn is benfitting from an impossibly low home-run rate. Yes, the Cardinals have good pitching, but they’ve also been lucky. They have a clear advantage Friday as do the Reds on Saturday. I believe Sunday is a wash.

Now let’s take a look at the offense (through Tuesday):

Player

L/R

AVG

OBP

SLG

OPS+

POS

Yadier Molina

R

.348

.386

.478

139

C

Allen Craig

R

.312

.356

.459

125

1B

Matt Carpenter

L

.323

.407

.470

144

2B

Pete Kozma

R

.245

.302

.302

69

SS

David Freese

R

.280

.352

.392

107

3B

Matt Holiday

R

.249

.338

.418

109

LF

Jon Jay

L

.238

.314

.342

83

CF

Carlos Beltran

S

.307

.346

.525

139

RF

The Reds and Cardinals stack up pretty evenly on offense. Each team has a big hole at short (though I think Cozart is a better hitter than Kozma in the long run) and each has a few hitters who have been fantastic this season.

I suppose I could beat around the bush a bunch more, but the long and short of it is that these two teams are both very good, they match up well, and this should be a heekuva series. I’m excited to watch it.

It seems to me from looking that xFIP for top pitchers is higher than ERA. I haven’t studied it in detail, but there aren’t that many fly balls hit. The idea that FB/HR rate will even out over a season to me seems like a shaky one.

@Hank Aarons Teammate: There are a ton of flyballs hit. Generally speaking, groundball pitchers give up fewer homers than flyball pitchers, obviously, but as for Lynn, 4% of his flyballs are going for homers right now. His career rate is around the league average (10%ish). No one gives up 4%. No one. I do look this stuff up.

@Jason Linden: BABIP can swing a lot from year to year for a pitcher, and fly balls are a subset of batted balls. Pitchers have often posted season BABIPs of 50 points lower than their career average. So while we might think that will revert, in June, it might not.

According to fangraphs, 5% is considered “excellent”. Your comment about 4%, then, is misleading (at least to me); you made it sound like no one is even close to that. Lynn also has exactly one year of pitching (plus 30 innings), so his historical rate is a small sample too. I think your conclusions are shaky. Sorry, no offense intended, but we all get to state our opinions. I’m not saying you will be wrong. I’m saying that I don’t think one can conclude what you are concluding based on the line of reasoning. For example, you might look at his minor league stats, but he’s clearly a different pitcher, for whatever reason, than he was in the minors.

@reaganspad: Yeah. The Cards are my most disliked team in professional sports…If I had to say something nice about them it would be their ball park. Beautiful ball park with the skyline and arch beyond center field.

Really looking forward to this series. Best case scenario Reds sweep and enter Monday in first by a half a game…Worst case Reds go into Monday five and a half back. My prediction – Reds take two out of three and gain one game on the Cards.

@L.A.Red: One of the people at MLB network covering the draft said he (Ervin) was his favorite player in the draft … so we shall see I guess. I have to say the Reds have done a pretty decent job drafting the last 5 years or so, so I’m pretty hopeful he will be good.

Ervin is a good CF/OF. Good bat and arm. Reds have another pick at #38.
The Cards got 2 great pitchers, 1 college and 1 HS.
The Pirates got 2 great players. An OF and a C, both from HS.
The Cubs got that 3B from San Diego U, second overall.

@WVRedlegs: Yeah, the WLB’s did get to 2 really good pitchers. I like drafting tons of high upside pitchers, because as we’ve seen over the years, teams (like the Reds) will trade for good pitching when they become MLB ready. The A’s and Rays are masters at that.

@Hank Aarons Teammate: Mottola turned out to be one of those inexplicable 4A guys. He played in the minors into his mid 30’s, nearly all of it at AAA (13 years). He got a couple of cups of coffee in the bigs after washing out with the reds.

@L.A.Red: He was supposed to go in the top ten at least, maybe top five, until he broke his foot. He was considered the third best pitcher in the draft after Mark Appel and Jonathon Gray. Yeah, he was alright.

@Hank Aarons Teammate: Yes, but that is largely guys who were big “ifs”. The Pirates got two guys considered to be locks. Everyone was desperately hoping Reese McGuire would fall to them. The Pirates were only the first that he fell to.

@Hank Aarons Teammate: I doubt he was drafted to be a closer. Seems the kid was an OF first, pitcher second. That means he was probably only closing because he couldn’t put in the workload to be a starter.

Plus, with the irresponsible, incompetent coaches in the NCAA, I think choosing NCAA “closers” might actually be kind of clever. It’s risky, because the team has less data to work with and has to project more, but these guys have a lot less wear and tear.

@nvilleredsfan: What I have noticed (or from the Old Cossack’s perception anyway) is that the home plate umpire has a lot to do with Leake’s success on the mound. If the home plate umpire squeezes the bottom of the strike zone and doesn’t allow (call) the legitimate low strikes, then Leake is in trouble because he is forced to pitch up in the strike zone just to get a strike called by the umpire and Leake simply can’t pitch effectively up in the strike zone.

It’s a bit worrisome to go into this series with a slumping Votto and the continued slumping of Choo. Will be interesting to see how quickly BP gets back in the hitting groove. He’s been great this year. Hoping for at least a close series. That last beating from the Rockies was brutal to watch.

@TC: More like the Cardinals are bringing their current 1-5-3 pitchers against the Reds current 4-1-3. Lyons is purely a fill-in for the Cardinals and is not close to the top of the rotation yet. Latos is the best healthy pitcher the Reds have.

Wainwright vs. Leake tonight. I’m very excited to see if Leake can continue his impeccable trend vs a staff ace like Wainwright. Who would have believed, in the beginning of the season, that this match-up would be this interesting? We’d have written up in the Loss column automatically, right? Boy, Leake is fun to watch. And I like that he’s a David in this match-up, insofar as the physical comparisons go between the two.

The Reds pitching, as a team, ranks very well.
4th in MLB in ERA at 3.34. 8th in runs allowed at 235. 1st in fewest BB’s allowed at 144. That has to make Brian Price a little happy and put a small smile on his face. The Reds pitching for so many years was at the other end of the spectrum. They sure have come a long way in a short amount of time. Good work all.